To Soar, To Sing
by Roga
Summary: John knows aircrafts like old friends. He's never known anything like the puddlejumper. A short study of John Sheppard and flying.


**To Soar, To Sing**

They're crashing.

John's been dreaming about flying his entire life, and crashing, damn it, was never part of the plan. But his stomach feels stuck in his throat and he can barely breathe and the plane is diving down, down, down…

"Keep her steady, Sheppard."

_Roll left_, his brain is screaming. _Roll left! You can still save this!_

He's lost in a thick mass of white clouds, nothing in sight to orientate him in any direction, and for a single moment he closes his eyes to clear his head.

"Sheppard!" a tinny voice crackles in his headphones, and John snaps his eyes open. "You okay there?"

"Yes, sir," he says, forcing his attention back to the instrument panel. Every muscle in his body is telling him to roll left, but the dials tell him that the altitude isn't dropping, that they're still on course, and he needs to focus, focus, _trust the instruments. _

"Remember what you gotta do?" his flight instructor asks.

_Roll left._

"Trust the instruments, sir," he replies, trying to keep his racing heart from showing in his voice.

_Roll left._

_Trust the instruments._

_Roll left!_

The battle between his instincts and his brain continues to rage, and if he doesn't get his act together he knows the Major will take control of the plane and that'll be it for him.

_Trust the instruments,_ he orders himself.

"Very good, Sheppard," Major Hartwell says over the headphones, although John can hardly see how all getting kicked out of flight school due to utter failure at flying is anywhere in the vicinity of good. "We'll be out of these clouds in no time."

_Yes_, his gut says, _because we'll hit the ground—_

—and then the clouds are gone he's flying in a clear blue sky, pure air stretching all around him, and the horizon is exactly where it should be, flat and level and glinting in the distance. John can't help but let out a great big whoop of relief, because he didn't crash, and the sky is so, so blue, and he's _flying_, and then he remembers where he is, clears his throat, grinning, rumbles a happy "Sorry, sir," into his mike.

Major Hartwell's as authoritative as ever, his crisp voice commanding John to turn left and take them back to base, and John replies, "Yes, sir," and finally makes that damn turn.

This time, he knows he's turning left but he can't feel it – his body's certain that he's flying straight. But the turn coordinator's indicating a smooth curve, and the HSI is slowly shifting anti-clockwise, and that's all he lets himself focus on.

* * *

He hates the fact that he'd panicked. 

"I'll do better next time," he promises later, when post-flight debriefing's over and Major Hartwell still hasn't said anything about expulsion.

The Major looks momentarily surprised, and then there's a flash of comprehension in his eyes. "Every pilot gets vertigo," he tells John. "You didn't lose your head. You didn't let your instincts control you. That's what makes a good pilot."

John nods, the Major's last word echoing in his mind, and tries not to burst into song.

* * *

John knows aircrafts like old friends. 

He can recognize them by their call: the F-4's ear-piercing shriek as it takes off and the F-16's sharp, windy whistle, the heavy beating of a Sikorsky CH-53's five rotorblades and the duller buzz of the two-bladed Cobra hovering above. The sonic boom of an F-15 streaking through the sky, which used to send shivers down his spine.

He knows how to spot them from miles away, when they're smaller than a fingernail, by sight: Blackhawks look like schools of whales, swimming through the clouds, F-16s are sharks. It's the nautical helicopters that don't resemble sea creatures, but rather geometric shapes: a square and a triangle are a Sea King, two triangles mean a Dolphin. A Chinook looks like a flying dumpster, a Kiowa is a parallelogram with a stick up its butt, an Apache looks like a fly, and a Cobra looks like… well, it's about three feet wide, so he's always banked on the fact that you won't be able see it from afar anyway.

He knows them by feel: by the width of the cyclic pitch stick beneath his hand, by the vibrations of the engine that shake the pilot's seat, but the speed with which the aircraft responds to his commands.

He knows them, and he knows their limits, just as he knows his own.

He's never known anything like the puddlejumper.

* * *

After the city rises, after he discovers this new toy that he can fly, John takes a puddlejumper 'out for a spin'. "We're gonna be spending a lot of time together," he justifies, "I want to get to know her first." 

"Her?" Elizabeth asks, smiling. "It's just a ship."

"Shhh!" He caresses the cool gray surface, feels it hum in response. "She'll hear you."

The jumper is a bright, dazzling piece of technology that was _meant_ for him. There is no horizon here, just stars. There are no limits on where or how far he can go, just freedom. It's the difference between flipping burgers and going to Disneyland.

Flying a puddlejumper isn't like flying an aircraft; it's just like flying.

* * *

He's crashing. 

Not crashing; falling, because you can't crash into anything when you're in space, can you? You'll just keep falling and falling and falling in vacuum forever, until some distant star sweeps you into its orbit.

No ejection seat in the jumper. No autorotation safety measures that allow emergency landings. Just his jumper, that, hell, he doesn't even know how it works: just that there are crystals and that it reads his genes and his mind and obeys him, like an extra limb – except for now, when it suddenly isn't.

"You know," he says sourly, "you really couldn't have chosen a worse time to grow your own opinion about how things are run on this ship."

The jumper continues to speed ahead – or maybe it's up, or down, there's no way to know. He tries thinking, again, tries fiddling with controls and crystals and everything on the panel, but there's no response. The display screen is dead, just like his affection for his betraying ship, and there's nothing left to hang on to.

The radio sputters to life. "Sheppard!"

John blinks. His radio's dead, he knows it is; it hasn't been operating for hours. "McKay?"

"Yes! Yes! Listen to me, you're on the route to Atlantis, now you need to open the panel on your top right side—"

"What? No, Rodney," he says dejectedly, "I'm not even near a gate, and I can't control the jumper—"

"Sheppard, listen to me, your ship is perfectly fine, it's all in your head, I'll explain it all later when you aren't in _mortal peril_. Now, you need to take manual control of the—"

"No, no," John interrupts again. Stars are spinning all around him, and he's swept by the kind of vertigo he hasn't felt since flight school. "The puddlejumper doesn't really like me anymore."

"Oh, for God's sake, are you listening to yourself?" Rodney sounds like he's close to having a breakdown. "Your puddlejumper's _fine_! You are not in space, that's just your imagination, but what you _are_ is hurtling towards the ocean outside Atlantis at a speed that wouldn't embarrass Superman, and what you will be is dead wet John-shaped whale food if you don't shut up and do what I say!"

It makes no sense, John thinks dizzily. There's no ocean around. The display isn't showing anything.

"John!" Rodney snaps. "I can read your ship's data from the Control Room. It's all in front of me."

"But—" he trails off.

_Trust the instruments_, his brain tells him.

He looks around the console, thinking, all the instruments are broken.

"Well?" Rodney asks.

But, he stands up, and realizes that on this his mind and his gut are in agreement: he's got something better.

"Okay, McKay, you'd better be able to get me out of this. Tell me what to do."

end

_A/N:__ written for the sgaflashfic backstory challenge. Title from a Walt Whitman poem._


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